Media Centre

Making direct mail click

As more and more expenditure is placed in the utilisation of online channels for marketing the opportunity to increase your share of voice and truly stand out from the crowd across digital becomes much harder. It is probably no surprise then that plugging other delivery channels into your customer contact strategy can present significant opportunities (check out some of our previous blogs for thoughts on how effective direct mail can be in helping you get noticed with your customers). The traditional methods of communication can become very important here and there is plenty of insight already existing on the power and effectiveness of direct mail as part of a multi-channel marketing plan. Take for example recent studies from Royal Mail suggesting 70% of consumers have responded digitally after receiving a direct mail (https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/06/13/royal-mail-insight-direct-mail/).

Whereas overuse and saturation of digital channels presents opportunities for using other forms of media to get noticed how can the traditional channels maintain relevance, especially when how effectiveness of online is measured completely deviates from digital? Attribution in this regard appears especially problematic and we must therefore ask ourselves the question of how can you truly make your traditional media campaigns comparable to online display, social and email? If only there was some way of attributing a ‘click’ to a mail piece.

We know how important click measurements are to the savvy digital marketer of today. Numerous marketing tools and agencies have set their commercial model on a ‘cost per click basis’. Most conversion %’s are measured not as a total % of the entire universe, rather a sub-section of those who clicked through to a website. But up until now it has been difficult if not impossible to truly gage an equivalent of a click for Direct Mail, i.e. just how many customers are coming back online as a result of receiving a DM piece. If any tracking occurs at all it is usually restricted to redemption of ‘online voucher codes’ which in itself isn’t without issue especially if these codes go viral.

We are beginning to uncover opportunities to think a little differently though. The rise of measurable and addressable audiences for targeting campaigns provides an opportunity to challenge the perception that a click can’t be measured via DM. Take the utilisation of a known customer universe and combine that with the ability to track online interactions with your website and you begin to move to a model where returning customers can be tracked. And if these customers can begin to be tracked we can begin to understand what behaviour they are displaying online after receiving a direct mail.

At Paperplanes we offer this kind of tracking capability as well as the physical production of the DM. We like to call the first visit back to a website after receiving a direct mail (measured to a like for like control cell to ensure we can track incremental uplifts) an ‘engagement’. As we work with more and more clients building our knowledge of the measurement process we are seeing time and time again that this ‘engagement’ measure is also being used as a direct measure of a ‘click’ effectively outlining just how a highly personalised and relevant direct mail piece can be.

It Is through offering this kind of measurement that we can begin to see the true effectiveness of mail. Let us say on average a typical click through conversion on social, online display and email tends to be around 15% mark (of course fluctuating dependant on the vertical or category). Now consider our standard conversion vs engagement comes it at around the 40% mark and you can begin to see just how powerful direct mail can be in getting your customers attention. This is before we even consider impact on life time value and repeat purchase rates, all of which are much more likely to occur after a customer receives programmatically triggered mail.

Considering clicks can now be measured across the DM channel and as we are seeing incredibly strong results it is no wonder more and more contacts are wanting to find out more about our approach. And if this has peaked your own interest why not give us a click through to our website and drop us a note on the contact form to grab a coffee. We’d be happy to cover this in more detail.